Hank Palmer is a ruthless but excellent lawyer, despised by many of his peers for his habit of representing often blatantly guilty criminals. One day mid-trial however, he receives a call from home informing him of his mother's recent death. Reluctantly, he ventures back to the town of Carlinville, Indiana where he grew up to convene with his family ahead of the funeral. As he expected, the greeting between himself and his father - the local Judge Joseph Palmer - is particularly frosty. As a young college graduate, Hank was desperate to leave the harsh and unfriendly grasp of his father but when the town's sheriff tells him that Joseph is now a murder suspect, he begins to feel a grudging obligation to cast their differences aside and help him protest his innocence.

There's no way that combining the geniuses of producer David Lynch and director Werner Herzog could result in something that wasn't utterly bonkers. But this film, based on true events, also has a startlingly emotional kick.

In San Diego, two detectives (Dafoe and Pena) converge on a suburban stand-off where a killer, Brad (Shannon), claims to be holding hostages. As the tension builds, Brad's girlfriend Ingrid (Sevigny) and his theatre-director friend Lee (Kier) arrive to help the cops, explaining Brad's somewhat strained relationship with his mother (Zabriskie) and his eccentric Uncle Ted (Dourif).

They also talk about how he has never quite been himself after a mind-opening trip to Peru.

In its first season, Big Love was often summarily referred to as "the polygamy show." True enough, but as with many of HBO's finer offerings, it offers more than meets the eye. And the expectations. While Big Love doesn't deliver the consistency or tension many HBO fans enjoy in The Sopranos, there's enough in this bizarre drama to support a solid DVD-viewing addiction.

From the first notes of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" ringing under an otherworldly opening credit sequence, Big Love hints at a combination of somber connection and sincere personal adoration. At the center is Bill Henrickson (Bill Pullman), an ambitious home superstore owner who lives a clean, Utah Mormon life... along with his three wives and gaggle of kids.

Was there any film so anxiously awaited in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Wild at Heart? The picture was released to a cult that had just been born: that of its director, David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet, in 1986, had reaped an enthusiastic following among the mainstream hipsters who had missed Eraserhead in 1977, and whose budding appetite for Lynch's singular brand of the macabre had been whetted by the prime-time ghoulishness of 1990's Twin Peaks. Wild at Heart's Palme d'Or win at Cannes just before its 1990 release only tantalized more; and after what seemed for Lynch's starving fans a nearly eternal wait, the film opened at last to high expectations, but decidedly mixed reviews.

Wild at Heart was puzzling, because it was screwed up and it was hard to figure out why. Time - and, 14 years later, the DVD release - helps to clear up that central enigma. Based very loosely on Barry Gifford's novel, this manic, Southern Gothic road movie now seems too deliberately weird. And in retrospect the cause seems to be that its creator, a strange man if the available evidence of his films is to be believed, and one who then was only recently revered as a certain type of genius, was trying so hard just to be himself.

Mike Waters (River Phoenix) is a narcoleptic street hustler who lives in the bus terminal, streets, and abandoned buildings of Portland, Oregon, and who dreams of one day finding his mother. Fellow hustler Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) takes care of Mike - he hauls the other man to safety when a sudden sleeping spell comes upon him, usually triggered by stress or memories of home - and although he too lives in the streets and makes a living accommodating the sexual whims of paying customers, he's the scion of a wealthy and powerful Portland family with every reason to believe that that wealth and power will one day be his own. Mike's in love with Scott; he says as much one night when Scott is explaining that love is something customers pay you to provide. "I love you and you don't pay me," Mike counters. In this lowlife milieu, such a bare declaration amounts to an act of grace. But Scott lets it pass and the moment slides by.

Phoenix, in interviews, was clearly thrilled when writer/director Gus Van Sant credited him with having written this scene in Van Sant's wonderful 1991 movie My Own Private Idaho. He should have been. Emotionally, it's a doozy, and it serves as the point at which these two fractured lives separate into their own trajectories. Mike's takes him back again and again to the same dogged search for love and the same stretch of empty highway. Scott's takes him to Italy, where he falls in love with the beautiful Carmella (Chiara Caselli) and, ultimately, to an encounter in Portland with his street mentor Bob (William Richert). Here the movie takes an unexpected Shakespearean turn as Van Sant lifts fragments from Henry IV, casting Scott as Prince Hal to Bob's Falstaff, even as Mike's story continues on in the real world. We know from Shakespeare that Scott will turn his back on his old friends and assume the throne in the end. If Mike is heartbroken it's because life in the real world is hard; that's why we have private ones.

You can almost plot David Lynch's lunacy on a graph. From perfect form in 1990, with the original Twin Peaks TV show, to borderline schizophrenia with the second season in 1991, to absolute lunacy in 1992, with the prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Filled with non-sequitur imagery and symbolism, Fire ostensibly tells how Laura Palmer came to be wrapped in that sheet of plastic which so fatefully washed ashore in the first episode of the TV series. But Fire doesn't really tell any story at all. There are scenes of exposition, but these are sandwiched between the endless dream sequences, the lunatic characters (like the woman in red and the one-armed man) who appear and vanish just as suddenly, and bonus raunch added just for the purpose of titillating the audience.

Darkly Noon is Brendan Fraser, a conflicted stutterer recently escaped from a Branch Davidian-esque cult besieged by the feds. His passion is Ashley Judd (blonde, braless, sweaty, and with unshaven pits), whose home he stumbles upon in the woods. What happens when worlds collide? Think Sling Blade, but far sleepier.

If you're going to borrow wholesale from another movie, you could do worse that thieving from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (itself borrowed from reality and the Leopold and Loeb murders).

R.S.V.P. takes the Rope recipe into the MTV zeroes, upping the body count considerably, transplanting the story to Las Vegas (in an apartment worthy of a Real World season), and packing in the sexy young stars (all up-and-comers and relative unknowns) to the point where they're spilling out the windows. Literally.

Remaking hit Japanese horror movies (a la 'The Ring') is Hollywood's latest plan to rake in big bucks without actually having to be creative or original -- and while "The Grudge" is nothing more than a cultural twist on the standard-issue haunted house movie, I will give credit to director Takashi Shimizu (remaking his own film "Ju-On") for giving me goosebumps. Lots and lots of goosebumps.

He succeeds on this front by providing truly chilling ghosts -- floating specters of inky black tendrils that form into the gray porcelain faces, horrifically gaping mouths and kohl-ringed, milk-saucer eyes of a family murdered in a Tokyo house that is now occupied (but not for long!) by the wife and terrified, catatonic mother of an American businessman.

But Shimizu also lends the film a unique structure that helps set it apart from the kind of prefabricated scary movies that dominate the genre. He follows a psychological (rather than chronological) narrative into an interactive patchwork of long flashbacks that reveal the genesis of the haunting and tie the whole six-degrees-of-separation story together in its latest victim -- an exchange student played by Sarah Michelle Gellar.